Iran hosts conference to disprove the Holocaust

[Gentle Giant]

Yes, it's 2006, and it's still an issue. More great Arab leadership (cf. paragraph 14, in bold underline).

Conference in Iran on Holocaust begins
Attendees mostly deny Nazis killed 6 millions Jews
By Anne Barnard, Globe Staff | December 12, 2006

TEHRAN -- Iran's Foreign Ministry yesterday convened a conference on the Holocaust that it boasted would provide a spirit of scientific inquiry and an airing of diverse views, but appeared to be attended primarily by Holocaust deniers and skeptics from around the world.

The conference, which was denounced in advance by the State Department as "disgraceful," was sponsored by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, who has called the Nazis' murder of 6 million Jews a "myth."

Participants from 58 countries, including some who have been prosecuted in their home countries in Europe for denying the Holocaust, showed up for the two-day meeting at a Foreign Ministry conference center in the snowy hills of northern Tehran.

Despite the Iranian pledge of an open inquiry, one Arab author who had hoped to convince Ahmadinejad that the Holocaust occurred said he was denied an Iranian visa at the last minute, barring him from the conference. Khaled Mahameed, an Arab citizen of Israel, said he had looked forward to an intellectual duel with the Iranian leader after sending Ahmadinejad his 300-page book documenting the Holocaust.

Holocaust historians, at a separate conference in Berlin yesterday that was backed by the German government and organized to protest the Iranian event, portrayed the Tehran meeting as an attempt to cloak anti-Semitism in scholarly language.

Raul Hilberg, author of the three-volume "The Destruction of the European Jews," said that historians base accounts of the Holocaust on Nazi records.

"This is not a figment of the imagination. This comes from the Germans themselves, and therefore any denial of these figures is absolutely senseless," Hilberg told the Berlin conference.

Under a banner lettered "International Conference of Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision," Iranian officials portrayed the meeting in Tehran as a groundbreaking review of history, but quickly made clear that a main purpose of the conference was to challenge the United States and berate its ally Israel.

The meeting is occurring as US officials are pressuring Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons program and when the Baker-Hamilton report on the Iraq war is raising the possibility of talks between Iran and the United States about Iraq.

"We hope this will be a beginning for deeper research into different aspects of contemporary history," Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki of Iran said in an opening speech. "We are preparing the ground for deeper fact-finding."

But in a rambling speech, he quickly veered into political confrontation, saying that questioning the Holocaust is one more way that Iran can challenge the United States, in addition to condemning US dominance in the United Nations, criticizing the US performance in Afghanistan and Iraq, and backing anti-American populist Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

The conference opened four days before elections for city councils across Iran and for the Assembly of Experts, a body of Muslim clerics who select and, in theory, supervise the country's Supreme Leader.

Saeed Laylaz, an economist close to the reformist wing of Islamist politicians, said the conference was aimed at rallying the extreme right-wing vote for the elections and boosting the president's populist appeal in Arab countries, where many people believe that the founding of Israel on what they considered Arab lands in effect punished Arabs for Europe's persecution of Jews.

Farzana Sayid Saidi, 29, an Iranian journalist covering the conference, said she had posted an entry on her blog the night before the conference asking, "What's important for Iran -- denying the Holocaust, or our economic problems?"

"We have no problems in the country, so we're going to review all the historical mistakes of others one by one," she said sardonically.

Some Iranian conservatives appeared embarrassed by the conference. Asked about the timing, Asadullah Badamchian, a leader of the conservative Islamic Coalition party who is critical of Ahmadinejad's economic policies, gave a tense smile. "Let me not say anything now," he said.

Scheduled for yesterday afternoon was a presentation by David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, listed in the program as a professor at Mayp University in Ukraine. Today there is the panel "Holocaust, the Achilles Heel of a Primordial Jewish Trojan," by Taregh Ahmed from the Al-Tajdid Social and Cultural society in Bahrain.

Mahameed, a lawyer and amateur historian who argues that Palestinians and the Arab world must accept the historical reality of the Holocaust if they want the international community to listen to their grievances against Israel, told reporters yesterday that Iranian officials, who initially invited him, denied his visa.

[groover]

Regardless of what these wretched haters think about the Holocaust, the existence of the State of Israel is an established fact that they have to accept.

[Dr Dave]

Originally Posted by groover

Regardless of what these wretched haters think about the Holocaust, the existence of the State of Israel is an established fact that they have to accept.

You may think that, and I may think that, but I'm afraid we cut no ice with these guys.

[groover]

I guess it's actually better that the Iranian bastard shows his true colors, so no one will buy his rhetoric about just trying to do what's best for his people.

[guy]

This kind of stuff plays very well in the Muslim world.

Guy

[Sandi22]

For bronze age mentality. Regression, that's what it's all about. To heck with modernity.

[Sandi22]

.

Here's the latest.
.....The one comment, about "Where's my sister?" says it all. To deny it all ever took place is delusional, and just plain cruel to those who survived it all, to those who lost relatives, to those who fought or lost friends & relatives in that war to end Nazi rule.

.....This tells of the situation with Irans leader and those who attended such an event, as well as how people around the world are looking at this, his latest travesty.

Holocaust deniers' meeting spurs outrage

By WILLIAM J. KOLE,
Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 56 minutes ago

A gathering of Holocaust deniers in Iran touched off a firestorm of indignation Tuesday across Europe, where many countries have made it a crime to publicly disavow the Nazis' systematic extermination of 6 million Jews.

The European Union's top justice official condemned the conference as "an unacceptable affront" to victims of the World War II genocide. British Prime Minister Tony Blair denounced it as "shocking beyond belief" and proof of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's extremism.

"I think it is such a symbol of sectarianism and hatred toward people of another religion. I find it just unbelievable, really," Blair said in London.

"I mean to go and invite the former head of the Ku Klux Klan to a conference in Tehran which disputes the millions of people who died in the Holocaust ... what further evidence do you need that this regime is extreme?" he added.

David Duke, an ex-Klan leader and former Louisiana state representative, was among those at the two-day conference. Although organizers touted it as a scholarly gathering, the meeting angered many in countries such as Austria, Germany and France, where it is illegal to deny aspects of the Nazi Holocaust.

In Washington, the White House condemned Iran for convening a conference it called "an affront to the entire civilized world."

The conference drew especially sharp condemnation in Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel said her country repudiated it "with all our strength."

"We absolutely reject this. Germany will never accept this and will act against it with all the means that we have," Merkel told reporters. She stood alongside visiting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who denounced the meeting as "unacceptable" and a "danger" to the Western world.

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy was interrupted by applause from lawmakers when he told parliament in Paris that the conference showed a resurgence of "revisionist" theories "which are quite simply not acceptable."

The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, answering critics who contend revisionists are simply exercising their right to free speech, quoted an unidentified survivor as saying: "If the Holocaust was a myth, where is my sister?"

Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, drew a sharp distinction between the conference and this year's publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which triggered protests across the Islamic world.

"It's one thing to poke fun at a faith — even Judaism. It's a different thing to lie about history," she said in a telephone interview. "The question is: When does hate speech become incitement? These people are haters — and haters can cause great damage."

But Soeren Espersen of the Danish People's Party, which staunchly defended the Muhammad cartoons, said people should have the right to speak their minds — even at a "hideous" conference like the one in Tehran.

"We believe in freedom of speech also for nut cases," he said.

In Vienna, where British historian David Irving is serving a three-year sentence for denying the Holocaust and contending there were no gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp, local media reported that Moshe Ayre Friedman — a self-styled rabbi who is not recognized by Austria's Jewish community — was attending the conference.

The Austria Press Agency said Friedman allegedly maintained that the true Holocaust death toll was closer to 1 million. Gerhard Jarosch of the Vienna public prosecutor's office said officials were trying to verify Friedman's remarks.

Frantisek Banyai, the head of Prague's Jewish community — which was decimated during WWII from 120,000 people to just a few thousand today — decried the meeting as "aggressive, wrong and disgusting."

"It's immoral. It insults me and it insults each member of the Jewish community, because we lost members of our families," he said. "It's a slap in the face of those decent people who know the history and want to learn a lesson from it."

EU Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Franco Frattini also condemned Ahmadinejad, who considers the Holocaust a "myth" and has called for Israel to be wiped off the map, for hosting the gathering.

"I want to state my firm condemnation of any attempt to deny, trivialize or minimize the Shoah," Frattini said. "Anti-Semitism has no place in Europe; nor should it in any other part of the world."

The Vatican called the Holocaust an "immense tragedy" and warned the world not to react with indifference to those who challenge its existence.

"The memory of those horrible events must remain as a warning for people's consciences," the Holy See said.

Francois Nicoullaud, France's ambassador to Tehran from 2001-2005, saw the conference as another expression of Ahmadinejad's continuing efforts to get back to the basics of the Islamic revolution.

"He's trying to scientifically justify the unjustifiable, in a sense," he said.

...

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

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[Jeffrey Wozniak]

It's amazing that these people list one tiny ten-mile sliver of Jews as the reason why millions of Muslims from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Emirates are mired in dictatorships, failed economies and jihadist fever.

[GoodSpeak]

Originally Posted by groover

Regardless of what these wretched haters think about the Holocaust, the existence of the State of Israel is an established fact that they have to accept.

Exactly.


Just like we all have to accept the existance of Iran as a result of Alexander the Great.



NObody got here first.

[John P. Cooper]

Actually, I don't really believe in the myth of Iran. Never happened. Well, there may have been a few Iranians...but not much more.